Internet Marketing

We have some clients that somehow back in the day were able to get their website listed with DMOZ.org. DMOZ has grown to be one of the most inactive and inaccurate directories that some of the engines still seem to crawl and use for their default directory listings and to show as the abstract on the SERPs. DMOZ is also known as the Open Directory Project or ODP.

MSN Search is now recognizing a new meta tag that allows you to request to opt out of showing the DMOZ description field as your search abstract listing. Why would you want to change this? DMOZ editors have been notorious in writing non-sexy decriptions for websites which will hurt your click through rate on your natural search placements.

Since most search engines aren’t even crawling or given any keyword relevancy to the meta description tags, it is in your best interest to focus the messaging on your meta description tag to be more marketing friendly to your product or brand offering.

Here is the “Say NO to DMOZ” meta tag:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
or
<META NAME=”msnbot” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

The first meta tag is for all crawlers and the second one is for the MSN Bot specifically. The change should take place once the crawler has re-crawled the page which usually from about one to four weeks.

When will someone just put a bullet in the ODP project please?

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Picking an affiliate publisher network to manage your affiliate program can be tricky depending on what your main objectives are and the budget that you are willing to spend to build up your program.

Here are some of the benefits of using affiliate networks:

- They send out montly checks to your affiliates to save you from additional accounting work.
- They have sophisticated tracking and reporting systems that will tie into your internal reports.
- They have large reach to affiliate marketers that have a tendency to only promote vendors that are part of one of these networks.

Running your own internal affiliate program is another option that many top vendors take on as well. Here are some of the benefits of having your affiliate program in house.

- Lots of flexibility in your promotions.
- You have ownership of your affiliates contact information and have the ability to communicate with them at no cost.
- You can custom tailor reports to your business instead of having to adopt the affiliate reporting interfaces to your business.
- You get the benefit of 1,000’s of inbound links to your site if your tracking system is done correctly.
- You don’t have to pay the monthly management fees and a percentage of sale that most networks require.
- Running with a 3rd party network can cost you around $2,500 - $3,500 alone in service fees as well as the payroll of your affiliate manager.

Here is a list of the top tier affiliate program networks:
OneNetworkDirect.com - Run by Todd Crawford, Former VP of Commission Junction (CJ), they have more then 40,000 clients.
Buy.at - headquartered in London, England with offices also in the US
Commission Junction - (otherwise known as CJ) - Headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA with offices in France, Germany and the UK
Linkshare - located in New York City, NY with offices in Japan and the UK
Performics - Owned by DoubleClick, powered by ConnectCommerce and located in Chicago, IL.
ShareaSale - Currently host over 2,000 affiliate publishers and are located in Chicago, IL
TradeDoubler - Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden with offices all over Europe and Russia.
Zanox - They are the European market leader in performance-based multichannel commerce with a central office in Berlin, Germany and offices in Holland, Italy, Spain, Sweden, UK and the US.
CPAEmpire.com - CPA Empire is more of a performance affiliate network that will run your exclusive offers to their partner sites.

Q: Should we hire an someone to manage the affiliate program?
A: Yes. Yes. Yes. In a perfect world, your affiliate program should be your least inexpensive means of acquisition in your business and should account for anywhere from 20-40% of your overall revenue. This varies depending on your vertical of course but I have seen well run affiliate programs bringing in more revenue and orders then paid search campaigns.

Q: Are there businesses out there that manage affiliate program relationships for you?
A: Yes. Some full service interactive agencies have internal resources to manage affiliate programs. You will usually at least benefit using an agency during your contract negotiations with the affiliate publishers as they are quite familar with payouts and monthly service agreements and know where to push back.

Q: What are some things we should look for in hiring an affiliate manager?
A: Ultimately, the candidate that you select to manage your affiliate program should have worked with one of the two large vendors like CJ or Linkshare before and be very comfortable making calls and working the phones. This person should have the capacity to write newsletters and be organized enough to manage a promotional calendar to keep their affiliates engaged in your program.

Q: What are the downsides to running with the large vendors like CJ or Linkshare?
A: You have to be 100% committed to your relationship with these top tier vendors as their monthly service fees aren’t cheap and you need to be selling enough product/subscriptions a month to cover the fee and still have margin on your business.

Q: What are the upsides to running with the large vendors versus smaller niche shops?
A: Being an affiliate marketer ourselves we are always looking for new vendors to promote in certain verticals and the
large vendors tend to have the bigger higher converting brands.

Q: What are the upsides to running with the smaller niche affiliate publisher?
A: You will get more one on one service as well as a dedicated account manager that will help you grow your affiliate
network.

In the end, I have seen people become very successful with their affiliate programs when managed in house with a good tracking and reporting solution or using 3rd party networks like CJ and Linkshare. I will do a couple follow up blog posts on some tips and tricks to affiliate programs.

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In a move perhaps indicative of their plans for their recent purchase of facial recognition company Neven Vision, Google now allows users of their image search to search for faces of specific individuals. This is different than simply looking for an individual in the sense that Google now seems to be able to identify the difference between a photo of a face vs. a photo of an individual.

Compare these two image search results - for our favorite jailbird “Paris Hilton”.

Normal Image Search

Face Image Search

If you look at the syntax in the code you will see this operator at the end of the query. “imagetype=face”. It currently appears that Google is still using the content of the page itself to determine the content of the image however in the future the technology acquired from Neven Visions would allow it to determine the content of the image from the image itself.

Let’s hope Big Brother truly does no evil.

PS - if you want to try out these searches for yourself simply copy the text below and replace the part i have put in bold with your own desired person.

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=paris hilton&btnG=Search%2BImages&gbv=2&imgtype=face

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Yahoo! Search announced on June 4th that Quality-Based Pricing has launched on their Search and Content Match products.

Here are some of the Key Features of Quality-Based Pricing:
• They will evaluate the quality of traffic from their distribution partners’ sites.
• Your click charges can be discounted based on the value of that traffic.
• The discounts will automatically be applied to your Yahoo account.

In an ongoing effort to raise the value of our Sponsored Search and Content Match products, they announced the phased rollout of the quality based pricing feature that should help increase the value of Yahoo! Search Marketing traffic to advertisers. Quality-based pricing is designed to measure the value of the traffic coming from Yahoo’s distribution partner websites and price clicks accordingly for their advertisers.

What is Changing?
Previously all traffic was treated the same—you were charged the same for traffic from all web sites within our network. With quality-based pricing, you may be charged less for certain clicks than you normally would pay, depending on the overall quality of the websites that are providing this traffic to you. As a result, your click charges can decrease.

How will Click Charges be Discounted?
“Quality” is calculated based on conversion rates and other measurements of the ability to deliver more interested and valuable customers to you from particular distribution partner sites. Discounts will be automatically applied to your account.

When will this Start?
This feature will roll out beginning June 4th and they will continue to expand it over time. This is just one of the things they are doing, along with future projects like domain-level blocking, to help increase the quality and value of traffic.

What Do I Need to Do?
There’s nothing you need to do to receive a discount—your click charges may be discounted based on the quality of traffic you receive. Keep in mind that the amount of the discounts may vary between advertisers: Some may experience a noticeable decrease in overall cost-per-click, while others may experience only a small decrease in spend.

Do I Need to Change how I Bid?
Quality-based pricing does not change how you bid on particular keywords. Both bid amount and ad quality determine an ad’s rank in Yahoo’s paid search results. As always, you never pay more than your max bid.

More Information
For more details on this launch, you can contact Yahoo Search at: 866-YAHOO-SM (866-924-6676) or visit the Yahoo Quality Based Pricing FAQ

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Google’s had both these options running in BETA over the course of the last year, but has finally made this available only recently to almost all current Google AdWords accounts - the ability now exists within AdWords to run radio and newspaper ads all within and through the AdWords interface. Out goes the debate of the traditional new versus old media in the trite “either/or” argument, and online advertisers are starting to revisit the concept of offline in supplement to their online advertising efforts, and vice versa. The concepts are pretty ingenious, really - an advertiser selects the channel of advertising they’d like to pursue (radio and/or newspaper) and essentially is able to send out digital RFPs via Google AdWords to creative houses that then bid for the advertiser’s business (radio), or an advertiser can select, create, and deliver newspaper ads all within the AdWords interface (newspaper).

In my opinion, this a great way for traditionally online-only entities and advertisers to pursue other advertising ventures to supplement their already-existing online customer acquisition efforts and to increase reach in an area where the barrier to entry is typically fairly large (financially, limited knowledge, etc). It will be interesting to see how this changes the face of the two largest standby offline advertising mediums moving into the immediate future.

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